


Lessons in the Hollow

by jollywriter



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, Other, hurt comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-12 08:30:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18007400
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jollywriter/pseuds/jollywriter
Summary: Corvo's suppressed the rebellion. Emily is close to coronation. But tensions are high between them and she's frustrated with what comes next. While wandering the city one night, she comes across someone she's never met; a wise and slightly odd old crone who knows more than anyone else she's encountered. Granny Rags takes Emily under her wing. There's a lot a future Empress needs to know if she's going to successfully rule the Emerald Isles.





	Lessons in the Hollow

**Author's Note:**

> I don't know precisely what this story is going to be. I see angst and hurt and comfort in the future as Emily confronts the world she's grown into. Also smut. Emily's an eager and growing woman and she's very certain none of the men she's met hold any interest for her. But the women? There's something to explore.  
> So there's a chance this turns into a kind of coming-of-age story where she grows into her powers of the Void as well as an Empress, learning politics, intrigue, love, and figuring out what the Outsider is really doing, meddling in all these mortal affairs.

Royal love is difficult under the best circumstances. Emily Kaldwin learned this as a child, even before she lost her mother. 

As a little one, she’d known what love was. Something warm and intimate and felt only in the deepest parts of her heart. She heard it when her mother tucked her in at night, and whispered, I love you, little sparrow. It was personal. 

As she got older and faster and stronger she learned there were more ways to say I love you that had nothing to do with the words themselves. 

Growing up in the shadow of the Empress, she heard the words often, “Yes, your majesty. As you wish, your majesty.” Most people said it with reverence. Respect, Emily figured. 

Corvo said it differently. He didn’t say it loudly, he didn’t proclaim. Her mother gave him an order, he’d bow his head a little, and say in a voice only the Empress could hear, yes, your majesty. 

It had the same tone as her own mothers’ I love yous.  


Corvo lived quietly. He protected the crown, Emily knew that. She noticed how the guards feared and respected him. She wondered why they were afraid of him. 

Of all the people Emily had ever encountered, Corvo was the safest man she knew. 

She was a teenager when she noticed how deeply he really cared for her mother. They’d be sitting close together, with her mother teaching her politics, and Corvo would enter the throne room. 

Her mother always seemed to exhale when he was near her. She breathed easier when this tall, dark haired man with deep lines of pain on his face stood in her shadow. 

Emily realized long ago that her mother loved Corvo just as much as he loved her. 

She hoped, sincerely, that they might get married. Like one of those beautiful, romantic, trashy stories the maids in the kitchen would read on break. Such a tangible, illicit love. An empress falling in love with her royal protector? 

How scandalous. How wonderful?

Emily hoped for a lot of things. 

And then her mother was betrayed. Corvo was punished and banished.  
And then Emily learned what the shape of the world was. 

#

She’d recovered. Corvo ended the rebellion, though he didn’t claim it. Emily was stashed at the bar, looked after by Samuel in his off hours. She trusted Samuel. He was twice as old and four times as wise as anyone she’d ever met. 

She liked to think sometimes that Samuel and her mother would get along. He had a penchant for speaking plainly, and her mother loved honesty. 

It’s why she and Corvo worked so well together. 

When the rebellion had been ended, Corvo took her back to the palace. He’d been a spymaster before the insurrection and the plague decimated the city. And while Emily grew, he was the Lord Regent.  
She grew up fast. Not just to take command of her kingdom, but because she didn’t want to let down her family. The memory of her mother was so dense in the palace that sometimes Emily found herself wandering, wondering which room Jessamine would be in. 

But there was no room. 

As she aged, other things happened too. Monarchs from around the world introduced themselves for trade, made pointed comments about how available their sons were. What bountiful alliances could be forged through the bonds of marriage. 

The men held little interest for her. It took a long time for her to recognize why. 

As she grew, she trained with Corvo. She wanted to know how to defend herself. 

Neither of them needed an explanation as to why. 

So he taught her. Everything he knew, every form of combat, stealth, trickery, and more. Emily would be her own spymaster.

There was more, she knew there was more. There were things she’d seen him do in the shadows that made no sense, but these skills he refused to teach her, Outsider take him. 

Her elder teenage years were fraught with friction about this. 

The things he left unsaid. The explanations he didn’t give her. The stories he wouldn’t tell. There was a world out there conspiring to unseat her, driven by forces human and beyond, and through some misguided sense of what, purity? Corvo refused to teach her everything he could to give her a fighting chance. 

What good was a simple sword against those cursed and blessed with the power of the Void?

She hadn’t been properly coroneted before she’d started wandering out. 

The palace walls were tall. But she knew since she was a small child how Corvo made it in and out without anyone noticing. He’d said it was part of his job; as a spymaster, he had to know how to go places and not be followed. If people knew his movements, they could plan around him. So he had to be utterly unpredictable. 

She used the same routes to get some space. 

Dunwall suffered during the plagues. And while much had recovered, the scars were everywhere. 

It’d started as a kind of sick fascination for her. She wanted to know just what the plague had done to her city. 

And then it became political. She needed to know the realm she commanded. 

And then it became personal. These were her streets. Her people. She needed to know them as well as she knew her own staff if she was going to lead them properly. 

And so she looked for the truth of what Dunwall was. How its people lived and suffered and thrived and died. 

And in the shadowed corners, she met people. 

She’d seen a shipment head down the alleys into the underground pathways. She’d been on the rooftops, running, circling the coast, when she’d spotted the cart. It was rickety, old, with a heavy pair of crates set side-by-side. 

Four people moved the cart. A single horse pulled it, led by a man, while the other three kept the cart stable with poles mounted on the edges. 

Curiosity bested her. She descended, and followed at a distance.  
She’d covered her face. The angular nose and chin were distinctive, so were the pursed lips. Jessamine smiled always, even if it was tired, even if it was pained. 

Try as she could, Emily didn’t have the smile. Her eyes could light up in ways that even Sokolov couldn’t capture in his art, but her mouth never showed the joy the same way. 

That, she inherited from Corvo. And people noticed. None had the gall to say anything though. Not to her face. 

She kept to the edges of the darkness, scampered through the night, watched the cart rattle down the path deeper into the underground. It splashed through puddles, nearly came apart as it moved over rougher cobbles, and then they turned, headed into a little bunker. 

She almost followed them when other movement caught her eye. 

She turned, squinted, saw a narrow, hobbled person walk up out of the darkness. She wore a tattered coat, high waisted breeches, tall boots, and clean fingerless gloves. Her hair was grayer than the steeliest sky, but her eyes were wicked sharp. 

She couldn’t move. The old woman gazed into the darkness, and picked her out with such ease that Emily felt positively rooted in place. 

“You’re getting old for this, Corvo,” the old woman whispered. 

“I’m not—“ Emily coughed, cleared her lungs. “I’m not Corvo.”

The old woman stiffened, squinted, took a few steps into the dark. 

“Well, I’m sorry my dear. Forgive me my lunacy.” 

Emily said nothing. 

“You look like him. I know the intensity in those eyes.”

“I thought I got my eyes from my mother.”

“Hmm, Jessamine was said to be a fierce woman, too,” the old woman didn’t flinch at the idea. “Sad for me, though, because I never gazed upon her with my own eyes. But Corvo, him I saw more of than anyone had any right to.”

“How? Did you work for him?”

“My dear, those questions aren’t good things to ask in the wide open like this.”

Emily hesitated. 

“My my, you’re so thin I imagine if you were tattooed, you’d be a bone charm all by yourself. Come along. I’ve got stew.”

She followed. She didn’t know why. 

She followed the old woman to a hollow between streets and gutters. Bodies were buried under a thin layer of lime, and there was a wooden platform half sunk in the mud and grime on the far side of the hollow. But there was an overhang, the bed was clean, and so was the little table. a 

A pot of stew boiled softly over a fire of gradual whale oil, dripped from a canister in the wall. She saw the rat tails piled next to the pot, and she cringed. But the scent that wafted up from the stew wasn’t terrible. It made her stomach rumble, she was so hungry. 

“You must be Emily,” the old woman said as she dished. 

“How can you tell?”

“The mixture of a mother and father’s features in a child go beyond what kind of hair they get and what kind of eyes they have. My dear, if there wasn’t so much of you already inside, I’d say I was at the royal table, with Corvo and Jessamine.”

“They weren’t wed,” Emily said. “I mean, they couldn’t have.”

“Do you believe that?”

She hesitated, “I can’t say.”

“My child, you may not have had a father in any traditional sense but you surely grew up with the man who helped give life to you.”

It was an easy truth, so easily recognized that Emily’s body shuddered in fear and relief in equal measure. The words came to her unbidden, “I hoped that my Mom would marry him. Make someone else the Lord Protector.”

The old woman put two bowls of stew down, spoons in both. Emily didn’t dig in, despite the ferocity of her stomach’s growling. 

“Corvo would have died before trusting anyone else with the safety of your lives.” She whispered. “He did, several times in fact.”

“No he didn’t.” Emily gripped the edges of the table. “He’s fine, he’s at the palace!”

“My child,” the old woman whispered without looking at her. “There are more ways to die than to have your heart stop beating. Anyone who’s crossed the void and come back with the mark knows more of death than anyone who’s actually spent the time doing the dying.”

“Who are you?”

“When I was young, and pretty, and suitors of every class fought for my affections, I had a name you can’t pronounce. When I was pregnant and outcast, I had a name that no one would could utter lest they insult civilized ears. When I fought my way back to the light of society, I had a name whispered in the highest halls of power. And then I got old. And I faded. And I find that time has picked the name I’ll be buried under. But you can call me Granny Rags, today. It’s a better name than I have any right to anymore. And I’m grateful for what I got.”

Emily had no idea how, but she knew every word was true. Outsider take her, every word was true. 

“It’s good to meet you, Granny Rags.”

“It’s nice to make friends, little Empress,” Granny Rags said. “You best remember when you do. They might be useful when the Void gets ideas.”

“Emily,” Corvo’s voice wasn’t close, but the urgency was there. 

Emily turned, stared at him. The mask was in his hand. He wasn’t angry, or disappointed. He exhaled slowly. “This is not where I expected to find you.”

“I’m sorry,” Emily slumped. 

“You forget yourself, Corvo. And you forget that masters are usually compensated with something shiny and heavy.”

“I can’t accept that, Granny Rags.”

“You think everything the girl needs to know about being a queen she can learn in those stuffy halls?”

He said nothing. He only listened. 

“We’ll talk.” He said at length. 

“That’s a good idea, my child.” She looked him up and down. “You look strong. That’s good.”

“You think something’s coming?”

“Something’s always coming, my boy. The only question is, who’s the something meant for? And are we strong enough to deal with what we receive.” She waved them away. “Be gone. My work has gone neglected long enough.”

She stood up slowly, her body popped with the movement, but when she snatched the shovel up, she was precise and swift in her movements. 

“Come along, Emily,” Corvo said. He did not hold his hand out. She followed. They took to the rooftops. He put on his mask. She lifted her bandana over her face. They returned to the Palace. 

But Emily would be back. That much she knew. Outsider take her.


End file.
